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I believe in the main assertions of third-wave feminism, that everyday discourse privileges my sex at the expense of the other; and that men too are harmed by this patriarchy in various ways, as Fathers 4 Justice ably demonstrates. Misogyny will probably be a topic I cover occasionally, since I am fascinated by the population-level misogyny in so many of our story-telling tropes and popular discourses. I'm also fascinated by popular culture for god knows what reason, as well as house prices. Ooer, lovely delicious house prices! Mortgages and rents, to you, dear reader.

I will share my learnings in the wonderful worlds of the social sciences. My focus is economics, but this blog will inevitably deal with geography, political science, sociology and psychology too. There are probably bits of humanities like archaeology and anthropology, plus some science, in particular neuroscience, since it's highly relevant to the social sciences.

Woohoo! Away we go!

Social science is the study of humans as social beings; how we do and don't behave around each other, especially in the field of sociology. Sociology is all about our non-material connections to each other, whereas economics is about the material side of our socialising, usually for some kind of advantage through exchange, also known as trade.

Society is the beast that is really being studied by these fields, rather than the internal life of the individual, which is where psychology comes in, exploring the deeper, personal side of motivation rather than the purely external connections and their social or material consequences (sociology and economics). But as psychology is my weakest social science topic, you can expect this to be the one I'm least assertive on in this blog.

Natural science has useful things to say on social matters too! Namely, the field of neuroscience grants people the inside scoop on what their brains are up to. Admittedly it's a nascent field, and we may never find the true seat of the self / soul / whatever, but damnit that doesn't stop us from trying!

Those fields will all find some kind of place, even in passing, on this blog, but as I'm writing about whatever interests me at the time, don't be too surprised to find the odd movie review / breakdown on here, too!

Do read the links in the order in which they appear please. Finding the right comments in the third link might be quite interesting. They are all by a user called BestTrousers and start with "RI" meaning R1.

The main argument used by HealthcareEconomist3 is to give a survey of several works, while BestTrousers goes for comparative advantage.

Hopefully you good folks can indulge me by forgiving this post. It is an unfinished mess because I wanted it out there as the anchor for a hyperlink from a Reddit thread.At the momebt everything below is a jumble of notes, but I will be reworking it bit by bit starting today.Hopefully this post will be sorted out and typed in full before the end of April 2017.

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Historical materialism is the idea that history progresses in stages - slavery, then feudalism, then capitalism, then socialism, then communism - driven by changes in the technologies or techniques of production, and that any human civilisation will exemplify this process.

This makes historical materialism an exercise in both historicism and materialism.

Historicism is the idea that studying the past can reveal history's in-built course or narrative, and so show you the future.

Materialism is the idea that ideas ( and institutions) ultimately* don't matter in determining our destinies, and that therefore only material…

The idea that labor exploits capital is equally as plausible, sans assumptions*, as the idea that capital exploits labor. This is only intended as a response to the formal concept, descriptive or normative, of exploitation in Marx's schema from Capital Volume I.

* Assumptions include the power relation whereby capital is just assumed to be above labor hierarchically.

~ ~ Capital exploits labor because...
... Capital earns income from production done by labor that capital didn't perform
& ~ Labor exploits Capital because...
... Labor earns income from capital that labor didn't buy~
Basically in good old formal logic fashion both of those cases above, being factual descriptions, are true at once or are false at once.